OK, so we wrote the headline of this blog post to be a bit alliterative.  Nevertheless, we’re quite happy to release a new feature that has really helped people have more control over the content they post to Gawkk: Our new post preview function.

Now, when posting a video to Gawkk, you’ll see a “preview” button that allows you to edit the details of the video, if it’s a new video to the site.  When you click “preview,” you’ll get the edit screen shown above, which also allows you to click on the thumbnail to select a new one through our Google image search overlay, as shown below.

We’ve already seen a nice increase in the quality of the posts made to Gawkk since releasing this feature two weeks ago.  Let us know if you have additional ideas or thoughts on how to streamline or improve the posting process.

Gawkk is all about finding and sharing the best videos from around the web.  We realized, however, that our old post layouts didn’t focus enough on the person sharing the video or making the comment.  After evaluating and testing a lot of possible layouts, we’ve settled on a dynamic post layout that we think strikes the best balance between the content and the users discussing it.

As you can see in the sample post above, we anchor the content with the avatar and username of your friend who most recently commented on the video.  We also post the newest activity at the top of your home page, which causes the most-active content to get bumped to the top of your stream.  This allows popular content to bubble to the top and makes sure that you always see the most recent action by your friends.

We’ve seen a big increase in traffic and registrations since releasing this feature over a month ago.  Let us know if you have additional thoughts or ideas on it!

At first it might look like just a small improvement but we think it’s a big deal.  That’s right, we’ve restructured our navigational header to include the search box in a more prominent location.  Gawkk allows you to search millions of videos, along with our channels and members, so we thought we should highlight that fact and make it more accessible.

In addition, we’ve also included links to our channel browsing page that make it easy to discover channels within popular categories such as News, TV shows, Music and Movies.  Please take a minute to explore these areas when you get a chance!

Whoa!  Looks like our suggested following feature has been working a little too well, as we’ve been seeing some of our suggested members wondering how they got so many followers on Gawkk.

We recently sent an email out to all of our suggested members.  Here’s the email update:

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Dear Gawkk Member,

You may have noticed that more people are following you on Gawkk and that you’re now getting emails about these new followings.  We’ve seen some tweets about this activity and wanted to address the issue to let you know what’s going on.

Last week, we introduced a suggested members and channels area at http://www.gawkk.com/setup/suggestions. We selected you as a suggested user because your activity on Gawkk seemed interesting, even if you haven’t visited us in a while.  Since then, most new members signing up have followed our suggested members and channels, so you probably now have several hundred followers.  These are all real people who each chose to follow you from the suggested users list, but we were not notifying you of these new follows.

Yesterday (May 26) we turned on follow notification emails for suggested members.  The default setting was to send a separate email for each new follow, but we have since changed it so that the default is now a single email once a day listing all new follows in one email. You can also now update your email settings for new follow notices at http://www.gawkk.com/settings/email/

We hope that this explanation is helpful and that you’re happy being a suggested member to follow on Gawkk.  We look forward to seeing more of your great likes and comments about the videos on the site.  If you’re still somehow concerned about being a suggested member, just email me back and we can easily remove your listing and place another Gawkk member on the suggested list in your place.

Thanks again for using Gawkk!

Gary & Thomas

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We hope this helps everyone understand this new feature, and we look forward to more great activity from the Gawkk community!

Gawkk has been launching a number of enhancements and improvements, almost daily.  Our recent improvements include a fancy new signup (and login) overlay that allows you to easily create a Gawkk account.  We’ll be adding support soon for Twitter and Facebook Connect to make it even easier to use Gawkk.

This new overlay also allows us to expose more of our functionality to users who are new to the site, including the “What are you watching?” post box.  Visitors can now interact with nearly the entire site and signin only when needed for a specific action.

We think the new signin overlay will make it even easier to get to know Gawkk.

We had a great time at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week.  We met lots of great people, got some great PR coverage (more on that soon) and did a number of interviews for both video and radio.  Below is one of the interviews I did for Techie Diva.

Techie Diva interviews Gawkk at Web 2.0 Expo

As we mentioned earlier, Gawkk will be exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco, CA from Wednesday, April 1, 2009 through Friday, April 3 in the “Long-Tail Pavilion” area.

We were recently included in the press release announcing the Expo with a small blurb about Gawkk:

Gawkk.com is launching their “twitter for videos” Website where you can watch, share and discuss videos from around the Web with your friends by answering one simple question: What are you watching?

Be sure to stop by booth #9 in the back of the expo hall to see our demo video and pick up some fun conference schwag!

Gawkk is going to be exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco from Wednesday, April 1, 2009 through Friday, April 3.  Please look for our booth in the the back of the expo hall in the “Long-Tail Pavilion” area.  We’ll have a demo video as well as some fun conference schwag to give away!

We’re rolling out a new version of Gawkk that continues our trend of simplifying the way things work.

The site may be offline for a few hours today (Monday, March 16, 2009).  Also, we’re rolling things out in stages, so you’ll see a number of changes this week as we release additional upgrades to the site.

Stay tuned for the first release later today!

Gawkk has always allowed you to save videos to your channel, post comments on a video and share them with your friends, but we had separate ways for doing each of these things.  That made it hard for new users to discover these features and for our power-users to easily do more than one thing at a time.

To simplify things, we’ve recently introduced a single area beneath each video listing that allows you to do all of these actions in one area and at one time.

Want to save the video to your channel?  Then just click the “Post” button and you’re done.

Want to let everyone know what you think about the video?  Just write your comment and click the same “Post” button.

Want to forward the video to friends?  Just select your friends from the friends list and, you guessed it, click the same “Post” button.

Also, you can also do any of these things together and they will all happen at the same time.

Ah, simplicity…

Enjoy!